Paths of Growth : Opening Retreat Talks

Whatever you are doing, everything should be done mindfully, dynamically, with totality, completeness, thoroughness. Then it becomes meditation, meaningful, purposeful.
It is not thinking, but experiencing from moment to moment, living from moment to moment, without clinging, without judging, ... Munindra

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Arizona Buddhist Resources

Selected Opening Retreat Talks

The opening talk of a retreat generally sets out the purpose of the retreat. The teacher giving that talk states what he/she believes is important to understand for this retreat, and equally what she/he believes is important about the practice and about life that this retreat will focus on. The opening talk is more likely to present a broad overview than subsequent talks of the retreat. By listening to the talks on this page it is hoped that you can learn something about what some Buddhist teachers consider important, give you some idea of how these teachers see the practice of Buddhism, perhaps gain some new perspectives on practice, and be able to pursue the teachings of the entire retreat or sesshin if the opening talk speaks meaningfully to you. In addition, you will get some idea of the thinking and approach of various teachers.

These talks were not deeply investigated, but were generally taken from talks that spoke to me in some meaningful way. You can click on the talk title to listen to or download it, and you can click the retreat name to see all the available talks from that retreat. As I enter more talks I will try to keep them in alphabetical order by the speaker's last name, so if you follow this peiodically you may have to search a little to find new talks. I hope you find value in these talks.

San Francisco Zen Center's Dharma talks are presented in a somewhat less user
friendly format than most other sites. You have no search capabilities. You cannot
tell what talks were
given in sesshin or what context any talk was presented in. They are listed by
date (newest to oldest) in tabs by year. That said, the above link to the talks
of this sesshin is to the 2011 tab. The bottom 4 talks by Paul Haller are the
available talks from this sesshin.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya was uncomfortable with his command of English,
and used a translator on this retreat. I used the freeware program Audacity to remove most of the
Burmese going back and forth between U Tejaniya and the translator on the opening talk and the
first 5 Q&A periods. In the opening talk linked to above I kept some of that back and forth so
you can get something of the flavor of how it went. You can listen to the several other talks I
removed the Burmese from, and amplified the volume of the questions in,
here. The quality of my products was inconsistent.